Glamping is proving itself to be an exceedingly plastic notion, applicable to pods, safari tents and now—says this person in the N.Y. Times—a blacked-out apartment 10 floors up a dark stairway above a rubbish-clogged, soon-to-be-black-moldy rat-scape.
Hats off to New Yorkers, and all you folks in New Jersey and Delaware. Everyone who was clobbered by Sandy. So far you haven’t resorted to killing each other over water and gas, which is what most of us sort of expected. And you haven’t burned down your co-ops with improvised gas stoves and too many candles. No one has called it fun, but there are stories of people pulling together and sharing spaces and having a joke now and then over how miserable it is.
But don’t go call it glamping. I’ve seen glamping. This is not it. Not close. Even sleeping in the desert in the back of a BMW X3 is closer to glamping. I don’t care that it’s something rustic being done by Arianna Huffington and a multitude of other celebrities and supermodels and people whose names I would know if I were glamorous. Just because they are glamorous, they don’t get to decide.
We—the glamor 99-percenters—we decide. And this isn’t glamorous.
Image: NYC just after being hit by the main brunt of Hurricane Sandy, by MichaelTapp.
